Hungry Club Offers Food For Thought On Black Issues

June 23, 1989|By BRUCE C. EBERT Staff Writer

Three times every month, noontime listeners to WTJZ-AM have more to chew on than just lunch.

Those are the occasions when the Hungry Club is in session. No initiation fee. No dues. Just food and stimulating discussion broadcast on the radio before a live audience at one of three community centers in Hampton Roads.

The topics are geared toward the black community because the aim of the club is to provide blacks with viewpoints and information they don't glean from the major news media.

"It should be a jumping-off point and rallying point to bring people together," says Diana Chappell-Lewis, program director for the forum's Portsmouth location, the Wesley Community Center.

That is precisely what the Hungry Club has been in Atlanta since 1945. There, hundreds of black business and civic leaders have been known to attend some programs, making the forum a vital means of mobilizing people for civil rights challenges.

The Hampton Roads forum drew about 200 participants a few months ago when Lt. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder spoke at another Hungry Club venue, the Hunton YMCA in downtown Norfolk. Otherwise, says WTJZ general manager Eric Reynolds, Hungry Club meetings have been attended by about one or two dozen since their inception here in November 1987.

Reynolds, who guided the start of the Hungry Club in this area, believes the local forums took so long to organize because blacks in this area did feel the urgency that blacks in the Deep South have felt.

"The struggle is not the same. I see a less-threatened black community here than exists in some other parts of the country," says the 32-year-old Reynolds, who was born in Wisconsin and reared in Georgia. Employment opportunities are greater here than in many other parts of the South, he explains, and there social and political climate is less-repressive.

Though many forum topics are of general interest, speakers always gear their talks to a black audience. Affordable housing, the meaning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and the ups and downs of desegregation efforts are among past subjects. At one recent forum in Portsmouth, two local advocates of the anti-apartheid movement generated support for the June 17 rally in Washington to urge government sanctions against South Africa.

The talks by Cordelia Kirk Sharp and Katura Carey-Harvey and a portion of a question-and-answer session that followed were broadcast on the air. The audience was a senior citizens group of about 20 people that met in the morning, stayed for the program, then had lunch when it was through.

"It is abominable that their system (of South African racial separation) exists," Carey-Harvey, of the region's Ad Hoc Committee Against apartheid, said in her speech. Censorship by the South African government prevents the rest of the world from knowing all the abuses against the black majority there, she said. "If we knew, we would shake in our boots. There'd be a hue and cry."

Sharp contended that the former president of the United States did nothing to shed light on what was going on. "Ronald Reagan said that in South Africa the whites were protecting blacks from attacking other blacks!" she said, provoking a hum of disbelief in the audience.

The Portsmouth setting is a functional, if modest, meeting hall. Located in the Prentis Park neighborhood of southside Portsmouth, it is a church social hall furnished with brown metal folding chairs and long tables arranged in a C-fashion in front of a small stage. A poster on one wall calls the slain civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., "a drum major for justice." On another wall is a picture of the Last Supper, in which all the men gathered have black skin. Jesus is visible only from the back.

The radio audience is probably about 10,000 listeners, Reynolds says. "It's a small wake in the water," he says. Besides enlarging the listening audience, Reynolds' long-term goal is to excite more people to take time at lunch on Thursdays to attend the sessions. He realizes it is harder to do here than in Atlanta, where there is a larger corps of black business executives, who have more than the customary half-hour or hour for lunch.

Reynolds also wants to find a home for the Hungry Club in more cities in the area. Besides Norfolk and Portsmouth, Newport News is the only other meeting site.

"Our attendance there has not been overwhelming," says Reynolds. Lunch is served for about $5 or less.

The ideal would be a forum every week, rotated among Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Suffolk, Newport News and Hampton, he explains.

Chappell-Lewis says the program's impact goes beyond numbers. Out of a recent forum on drug abuse, for example, developed a new organization for addicts, Narcotics Anonymous. Twenty-five people trying to kick their drug-dependency came to the first meeting.